Thoughts From the Notebook 1

“Sorry for being such a spaz all the time,” I told my manager at work today, accompanied by an apology.
“It’s okay,” she said, “you just need to focus more. You tend to get distracted easily because….well, you have a very abstract mind.”
She laughed, then, and I just shrugged.

The problem with being distracted easily is that thoughts which may be worthwhile tend to flit across the mind at unpredictable moments. Too many nights found me sitting in front of the computer screen staring at an empty blog post and wondering what that one idea was.
My solution came in the form of a pocket-sized leather notebook which I have been carrying around lately to remedy just such a problem, and it is from these pages that I would like to share two entries from last week, both on the theme of transcendence.

1

8.July.2008

I am sitting in my math class and it occurred to me that the people here could very well just be animals: sweating, breathing, mating, feeding, dying animals. Fludious globs of flesh. And yet we are here, bent over our notebooks in consideration of that which is NOT sweating, breathing, mating, feeding, and dying. We were born of the earth, and yet, we find ourselves inexplicably drawn up into this abstract world, spurned on by the discovery that some unknown grace has allowed us to understand the secrets of the gods. This paradox is precisely what it means to be human. but humans are only a transitory stage…at least for some of them.

2

12.July.2008

Man is paradox. The great students of human nature all knew that man was the “isthmus of a middle state.” Nietzsche spoke of man as a rope between an angel and a donkey; Freud spoke of the Ego trapped in the middle. Lewis, through Screwatpe, called man an amphibian: half-animal and half-spirit. It is this out-of-place-ness which is the cause of man’s angst, or “forlornness” (to borrow a phrase from Sartre). The standard existential (or even absurdist) solution has been in a sort of accepted resignation to this “accidental” fate, but I see this as a kind of laziness, or a failure to choose. Man is stuck in the middle: he cannot bear to stay as he is. He must either go up, transcend the earthly and actualize his spirit, or else he must abandon his pretenses and slump down into an animal stupor. It is this choice which I believe Christianity attempts to explain through Christ’s transcendence of death. The foolish and the ignorant have so often used this image of hellfire for their own ends and have failed to understand its meaning: man has a soul; this is his problem: this is why the descent into animal sensuality is inherently doomed to failure. The fires of Hell are nothing less than the pain of a soul which cannot die, but who has refused the gift of Life.
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Finally, I want to add that I’ve been rethinking things about this blog in general, and would like to finally get on a schedule. This blog is officially becoming bi-weekly. Every Sunday I will attempt to post something theological in nature, while during the week (sometimes between Tuesday and Thursday, most likely Thursdays) I’ll be posting on all other topics. I just picked up Bertrand Russell’s The History of Western Philosophy and will more than likely be reporting on that as I go through it.